The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it).

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The reason I love this paper is because it’s not often that life hands me an example of prejudicial thinking so perfectly gift-wrapped for analysis. In this case, there’s absolutely no reason why the exact same underlying experimental evidence couldn’t be presented using a totally different frame. Instead of talking about a “negativity bias” and wondering why conservatives are so negative and speculating that this might explain conservatism, one could take the exact same data and talk about a “Pollyanna bias” and wonder why liberals are so unaware of threats and speculate that this might explain liberalism.

This is how political partisanship works, folks. It’s not that conservatives and liberals have different conclusions. Sure, that’s what most of the debates are about (for or against gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc.) Those debates never get anywhere, however, because they miss the point. Conservatives and liberals see the world in different ways, and the way their conflicting world views actually compete with each other for followers is by spreading the assumptions that–if you accept them–lead logically to their policy positions. The way to win a debate is not by having more evidence or better reasoning because people don’t actually pay very much attention to evidence or reason. The way to win the debate–or at least to gin up your own side–is to frame it in such a way that you must be correct before the debate even starts.

Thus, in this case, Mooney starts out with the question: how do we explain conservatism? What he doesn’t actually come out and say–but what is actually the most important part of his piece–is the assumption that conservatism is an aberration and liberalism is the norm. There’s nothing about liberalism we have to explain; it’s just natural. But conservatism? It begs for some kind of explanation. Once you accept that premise, there’s really not much left to talk about. C. S. Lewis even invented a term for this debate style: bulverism:

The modern method [of argumentation] is to assume without discussion that [your opponent] is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third — ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment’, E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth [and Twenty-First] Century.1

As pleased as I am to have such a clear case study of Bulverism / winning the argument through framing ready at hand from now on, the thing that makes me sad is that it isn’t just MotherJones engaging in it. The researchers, by using the term “negativity bias” without an accompanying “positivity bias”, are jumping right in as well. (The name of their paper is: “Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology.”) Although sad, it’s hardly surprising. Dr. Jonathan Haidt was quoted about this very problem in the NYTimes back in 2011. Commenting on total domination of social psychology by the political left, he has said:

Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

The article goes on to quote him again:

Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

It’s bad enough to have MotherJones serving up the Kool-Aid, but it’s really quite sad to have academic researchers as their direct suppliers.

As a coda: I do think that there are real and interesting psychological differences to study with regards to politics. But I think that this research is most useful when, as Haidt’s own Moral Foundations Theory does2, it seeks to take all sides seriously and create room for understanding and common ground. And not when, as with the articles in question, it serves as a flimsy excuse to pathologize your political opponents.

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Your post nearly screams “I want to talk about framing and hurray! here’s an article that will let me do it.” Framing is important, there’s a lot of it going on, and you are right–certainly within your rights–to call it out.
But the article and study you lead with is not a particularly good foil. In fact, using it the way you do does more to show your own framing bias than that of the article.
Looking to the study, if one shows negative or aversive images to test subjects and notes that some people respond more than others, the natural way to describe that (for anyone of any political persuasion) is to talk about the more, the greater, the larger response. That’s the way we talk. To wrest that observation into “some people respond less” (are pollyanish, in your terms) requires a concerted effort to bias or reframe the observation. Sure it can be done, but you have to work at it–as you have. (Of course there are more layers of discussion possible. Why did you ask that question? Doesn’t the asking itself show a bias or framing? Does “optimism” scan positive and “pessimism” scan negative? If so, is that a bias, a framing, embedded in our culture or language?)
As for the Mother Jones article, I would extract a different quote for what I think the real point of the article is, one which is about as neutral as I can imagine anyone writing, even granted that it characterizes conservatism rather than liberalism:
“There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.”
(In fact my criticism would be that the Mother Jones article wraps a lot of words around this quote, and should rather have started AND ended with this one paragraph that is someone else’s observation.)

Agreed. The Hibbing, Smith, and Alford article which prompted the Mother Jones piece explains that “positivity bias” means a heightened response to positive stimuli, which liberals don’t exhibit. Before framing this as the awful bias of the academy, it’s worth considering the possibility that the baseline doesn’t come from assuming liberals are normal and conservatives are strange, but from the result that response strength is roughly equivalent between liberals to positive stimuli, liberals to negative stimuli, and conservatives to positive stimuli.

Looking to the study, if one shows negative or aversive images to test subjects and notes that some people respond more than others, the natural way to describe that (for anyone of any political persuasion) is to talk about the more, the greater, the larger response. That’s the way we talk.

It is not the case that we naturally talk about “the more, the greater, the larger response.” Sociopathy, for example, is defined not by an excess but a lack of response (in this case: empathy). When we remark on the fact that sociopaths exhibit a lack of empathy we are implicitly defining a certain degree of empathy as the norm and sociopaths as the deviation from it.

It is in exactly the same sense that conservatives in this research are described as exhibiting more attenuation to negative stimuli relative to a norm, which is (implicitly) liberal behavior. That is not a neutral framing. It would also not be neutral to say that liberals exhibit less attenuation to negative stimuli relative to a norm which would be (implicitly, again) conservative behavior.

In a politically-charged paper, effort should be taken to maintain neutrality. And a neutral statement would simply observe that liberals and conservatives differ from each other, without implicitly stating which (if either) ought to be considered the norm from which the other deviates.

So when you write:

To wrest that observation into “some people respond less” (are pollyanish, in your terms) requires a concerted effort to bias or reframe the observation.

I have to insist that this is merely your own bias talking. I get that there’s an element of subjecitivity to this, but I rest my case on two facts:

1. The fact that we can–and do–find a lack as remarkable as an excess when it deviates from a norm
2. There is a neutral statement available which posits neither a negativity bias or a Pollyanna bias.

If I was trying to supplant the negativity bias with a Pollyanna bias and pass that off as neutral, you could easily dismiss this as just warring prejudices. But when there’s a neutral statement of the problem available, I don’t think you have much of a case when you try to bolster one particular slant over another.

Thanks for finding he technical definition of ‘negativity bias.’ The fact that there is a ‘positivity bias’ after all is important and relevant.

I will stick to two main points that I made, however. The first is quite strong: even if ‘negativity bias’ is a technical term, there’s no excuse for the way the MotherJones piece exploited it to further the perception that liberals are the sane norm and conservatives are the troubled deviation from it.

The second is less strong, but worth mentioning. The idea that liberal bias pervades the social sciences isn’t a mere conservative fever-dream. It’s an objective fact. It is, furthermore, incontestable that that degree of homogeneity cries for an explanation or–at the least–an abundance of caution. Haidt is right: the one-sidedness of social science research undermines its credibility and very likely hampers its objectivity as well.

That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it).

Image: a very large spider on the face of a frightened person

Conservatives: Get the spider off! It might bite!
Liberals: Look at that girl’s sexy eyes! Hey baby, can I get you a drink?

Image: a dazed individual with a bloody face

Conservatives: Is he OK? Does he need a doctor?
Liberals: Hey, looks like Gears of War 3! Let’s play!

Image: an open wound with maggots in it

Conservatives: We need to get that clean and healed!
Liberals: Wow, what was in my weed this morning?

Nathaniel: You are assuming that the underlying data is symmetrical, so that the story is all in the framing. I assume (without investigation, to be sure) that the underlying data is NOT symmetrical and that there is a story in the asymmetry, however framed. Can you elaborate, one way or the other?

You are assuming that the underlying data is symmetrical, so that the story is all in the framing. I assume (without investigation, to be sure) that the underlying data is NOT symmetrical and that there is a story in the asymmetry, however framed. Can you elaborate, one way or the other?

The paper in question is akin to a meta-study and it (1) doesn’t report data at a granular level and (2) combines many different kinds of studies. So I would say that it’s folly to presume either that the data is symmetrical or asymmetrical, since there isn’t even a single data set about which to pose such a question. (And, if there were, it would still be entirely possible that the answer would be “indeterminate”).

So no, I’m not imposing a strict requirement of symmetry or asymmetry. I’m merely noting that if you have basically two measurements (how liberals respond to negative simuli and how conservatives respond to negative simuli) its entirely optional whether one chooses to frame the liberal response as the baseline, the conservative response as the baseline or–which is the more cautious and objective approach–refuses to assume that either position is the baseline.

The authors of the paper clearly choose not to take the cautious and objective approach, writing:

Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. (emphasis added)

Why “compared with liberals”? No reason, justification, evidence, or rationale is given (that I’ve read so far: the paper is quite long and I’ll admit to skimming parts). Please also note that their baselines is established in terms of ideology, not data. It would be one thing to find that 80% of the population had fell within one range of responses (including liberals, moderates, and some conservatives) and that 20% of the population feel within another, more extreme range (including predominantly staunch conservatives). Something like that could justifiably be characterized as “conservatives are more responsive to negative stimuli than liberals,” but no analysis of the kind took place here.

The framing preceded the data and was never treated as anything but axiomatic.

From the paper:
“If strong negativity biases were once selected for but now are not, it could help explain why results often indicate that conservatism is in some senses better defined than liberalism. Conservatives have a negativity bias, whereas liberals do not have a positivity bias and may or may not have a negativity bias. Conservatives sometimes take umbrage at this situation, arguing that it is the result of liberal academics viewing conservatism as an aberration that needs to be explain (Will 2003). In truth, its status as a tighter, more discussed phenotype may be a result of the fact that, in contrast to proto-liberalism, proto-conservatism was once selected for.”

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C. S. Lewis, “Bulverism,” in God in the Dock, p. 273, which I got from here.

The book-length exposition of this theory in The Righteous Mind is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.